Gene Rodenberry's creation Star
Trek is testament to what human beings may some day become. The ever-evolving crew of
the Starship Enterprise, over the past thirty years has largely eliminated the racial,
sexual, social and religious tension that plague life on our planet today. Often ignored
by non-trekkers, the Star Trek television series, along with the expanding universe
of Star Trek movies, have created a social entity called the Federation, where the
best of human (and other) potential is realized. The Paramount Internet site states,
"Part of Star Trek's cultural phenomena has always been its accurate
reflection of human social concerns."

Our family recently saw the newest movie, Star
Trek: First Contact. The Enterprise and her crew time travel back to the year 2063,
where planet Earth is about to establish first contact with extraterrestrial intelligent
life. This intelligence has been drawn to Earth through the warp signature of a space
vehicle of human design and construction. In other words, humanity has been noticed when
it has technologically evolved to the point of achieving faster than light space travel.

A significant portion of the movie's plot revolves
around a twenty-first century human, Lily, who finds her way aboard the Enterprise where
she inevitably engages Captain Jean Luc Picard in a conversation. What struck me about the
exchange was Jean Luc Picard explaining to Lily that twenty-fourth century human beings no
longer place emphasis on the accumulation of wealth. Picard goes on to say, humans now
choose to "better themselves" instead.

I feel with more intensity than ever before that
economics has invaded our lives to such an extent that it is more and more in
control. It seems that everything we do, how we relate to each other, what we see as our
future, and how we view ourselves, is tied to economics. Karl Marx wrote,

Objects in themselves are external to man, and
consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only
necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of
those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals.

Money is an object and money is external to people.
I not only suspect that money is by its very nature alienable to people, but that it is
the root by which we alienate ourselves from each other.

The Celestine Prophecy, a wildly popular (and
poorly written) novel, speaks of metaphysical insights including an energy economy.
The fourth of author James Redfield's nine insights as summarized by Alan Atkisson in New
Age Journal, August, 1994 states,

An unconscious competition for energy underlies all
conflicts. By dominating or manipulating others, we get the extra energy we think we need.
Sure, it feels good - but both parties are damaged in the conflict.

So many people experience all relationships in terms
of economics.

Diminishing Value of
Work

I am the son, the only child, of immigrant Polish
parents. Like them, I too am an immigrant, being born in England. I distinctly recall the
hours that my father and mother spent working to support the family in a land that then,
like now, has a prejudice against foreigners. That prejudice has shifted from nationality
to nationality, as if one group, upon acquiring acceptance and buying into the promise of
the American dream, has to pass on a necessary hardship to newer newcomers, similar to
freshman pledging for a fraternity. The misgivings of such a system are obvious. There are
always groups, based upon external differences, that don't quite blend in well enough to
be accepted as part of the whole.

My father Jan worked for thirty-five years in a
bakery. He was a loafer, pulling a dozen loaves of enriched bromated white bread out of
the oven at one time. He stood on his feet, twelve to sixteen hours per day, in front of a
hot oven that never stopped circulating thousands of loaves of baking bread. Jan never
declined working overtime for two reasons. First, the family benefited from the extra
income, and second, he was afraid that refusing overtime might lose him his job.

I didn't see my father very much because he left for
work before I arrived home from school. My mother, Stanislawa, left on the subway for
Manhattan soon after I came home. She was a cleanfill, working for a financial center on
Wall Street. She cleaned banks and stock brokerage offices as well as adjoining bathrooms,
stocking them with amenities such as toilet paper, paper towels and hand soap. I did not
see her much either.

I remember my father once saying that, "We
should kiss the ground. America is the sweetest soil on Earth - as long as you have your
health and you can work." My father and mother's relationship with each other, me and
the community was dictated by the economics of the times.

I often wonder what thirty-five years working for
the Company meant to my parents. They seldom had time for themselves. They never enjoyed a
vacation and rarely traveled. They felt that illness could come at any time, ending a
productive working life. For them, America was Jersey City NJ, a melting pot of people,
work, sleep, crime and uncertainty.

For all the uncertainty, they managed to save money
for the future. Food was plentiful. The bills were always paid in full. Interestingly,
neither of my parents ever used a credit card, a checkbook, nor had they ever applied for
a loan, not even for the house they owned.

By the time baby boomers had children of their own,
the economic situation had changed dramatically. As family income inched forward, it
became more and more difficult for them to make ends meet. Today, unlike their parents,
baby boomers have not been able to save very much. Quite the contrary, their debt inches
forward until one day they are shocked to discover the extent of what they owe.

The problem is simple. The minimum wage is worth
less than it used to be. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the value of the minimum wage
has fallen by nearly 50 cents since 1991. This is equivalent to 12% off every pay check.
More importantly, it is money denied to those who need it most - minimum wage earners. The
result is even greater income polarization."

Thirty years ago, the top execs at the 30 largest
companies made 44 times what the average worker got...A minimum-wage worker would have to
work for 419 years to earn what the average chief of a big company got last year."

Growing Disparity

The rate of inflation and the cost of living have
outpaced the increase in wages. Although the productivity of the American worker has
increased dramatically in the past decade, factory worker pay has gone up sixteen percent
while chief executive pay has gone up ninety-two percent (in the past six years).

The United Auto Workers, many of whose members
cannot afford the automobiles that they help manufacture, maintains a homepage on the
Internet where a comparison can be made between a working class wage, minimum wage and CEO
compensation. I entered my teaching salary and the system returned the following results:

It would take you 82 years to earn what the average
chief at a big company made last year. On the other hand, in just 10 weeks you make what
it takes a minimum wage worker a year to earn.

In 1995, Lawrence Coss was paid, $31,528 an hour,
$252,230 a day, and $1,261,153 a week. That adds up to $65.6 million in salary and bonus
for the year.

What has happened since the time my parents were
part of the productive work force is that worker productivity has increased to point where
the US worker is the most productive in the world at the same time that the purchasing
price of the dollar has fallen. Inflation has outpaced salary increases. Those who own the
means of production however, have seen their salaries skyrocket to the point where their
incomes for one year are higher than the lifetime income of the average United States
worker.

If, as Marx said, "Objects in themselves are
external to man, and consequently alienable by him", then the ultrawealth of the top
one-percent who possess most of everything is the ultimate in alienation. Not only does it
alienate the poor from the rich, it alienates all of us from each other since all our
systems - political, economic, social, etc. - are designed to separate rather to join.
That way, we continue to argue amongst ourselves over issues such as a twenty-five cent
increase in minimum wage rather than address one real source of our malaise - widening
income disparity

In the presidential election of 1996, much has been
said about labor's multimillion contribution to the Democratic Party and the reelection of
President Bill Clinton. Little however, has been said about corporate contributions to
politicians, typically to the Republican Party. These corporate contributions outpaced
labor by at least four-to-one. While laborers struggle to raise their wages to keep in
line with the increasing cost of living, the Corporations, through the mechanism of
downsizing and the insatiable need for increasing the increases in profits, alter policy
through political paybacks purchased in the form of political contributions.

While the corporations attempt to disparage the
labor movement, claiming them to be too powerful, it is they, the corporations that are
exactly so. In the Sunday Rutland Times Argus of November 24, 1996, it was reported
that:

The combined sales of the top 200 [corporations]
last year were $7.1 trillion, bigger than the American GDP [Gross Domestic Product] and
bigger than the combine GDP of 182 nations - all the world's nations except the nine
biggest.

Who Benefits?

What does humanity get with the concentration of
wealth in the hands of so few? If we are to believe the trickle-down economists, we might
accept the megamultinational corporations as benevolent enterprises, providers of
employment for the masses. If the corporate operating philosophy were truly such, then it
would be self-evident that people come before profits. Livable wages with meaningful
employment would be the rule, distributing profits equitably throughout society,
especially to those who produce the goods that make the corporation viable and successful.
Precisely, the opposite happens.

Overall, the top 200 [corporations], with 28 percent
of the world's economy, employ barely one-third of 1 percent of the world's workers.

The population of Planet Earth is rapidly growing.
The richest country in terms of human resources, China, is in the midst of an economic and
industrial growth not seen since the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. Imagine, a
half-billion or more people embracing the capitalist model. The combined population of the
so-called developing countries, all vying for the lifestyle of the West, will at some time
undevelop the first world. As jobs head toward China, India and the Pacific Rim, where a
wage earner makes as low as thirty-five cents per hour, jobs in the United States will
continue to disappear. As this happens, more and more people will be treated globally as
commodities, they and their labor sold as goods to the lowest bidder, useful, as my father
said, so long as they have their health and are capable of work; especially useful, if
they hunger for work, competing with each other for the limited jobs at subsistence wages
and less.

The entire discussion thus far has centered on the
underlying apparatus at the heart of global capitalism. Yet, how can any global economic
system be considered successful when starvation is so common? Eight-hundred-million people
around the world face starvation daily. I think it obscene that economic systems exist
which allow millions of people to live in hunger while accommodating one individual in
earning $252,230 a day.

Crisis

Nations, just like corporations, are equally active
participants in contributing to the problem. Nations, are in fact, corporations. Their
borders separate, creating varying economic systems leading to disparity between people
both within and without those borders. One would think, if one were hopeful, that the
twenty-first century could witness a transformation in global thinking, transforming world
reality a step closer to the science fiction of Star Trek.. That transformation, I
believe, will come out of necessity as the "developing countries" approach the
status of the "developed" nations and the distinctions between us begin to fade.
We will then all be a part of the Third World with nowhere to go but to place people,
humanity, before profits on a global scale.

Baseball Cards

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) is the master of the
Japanese poetry form called Haiku. Basho traveled throughout Japan composing haiku which,
in Japan, classically consists of seventeen syllables in three lines, which relate to
when, where, why. The haiku is meant to elicit strong emotion. Here is Basho's most famous
haiku:

furuike yakawazu tobikomumizu no oto

old pond; a frog leaps inwater's sound

WJH

Recently, host Bob Edwards of National Public Radio
talked with T. R. Reid about the discovery of a three-hundred year old manuscript of
Basho's writings. "Reid compares the find to uncovering a book containing William
Shakespeare's original plays." The NPR story then goes to ask whether the discover of
the manuscript, who happened to come across the find by searching for his personal
belongings in the house in which he lived after it had collapsed, was going to be rich.
What would the value of this manuscript be? The manuscript would be given to a museum. The
literary find would not, as is often the case in the United States, be sold, or possessed
for its anticipated value.

Contrast this to the recently completed baseball
World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the New York Yankees where a young boy reaches
out over the edge of the fence and catches a fly ball, giving the batting team a home run
and a victory. Catching the ball and the desire to do so in itself, is not a dishonorable
intention. In US culture however, the ball, unlike the Basho manuscript, becomes a
possession prized for its dollar value, a collectible which often sells for thousands of
dollars. People scramble and jump over each other at the ballpark in order to possess and
sell these "collectibles"..

When I was a youngster, my friends and I had fun
trading and flipping baseball cards. We did not, as is common today, save them for their
worth as items to be protected in plastic sleeves and sold at a later date for profit. The
same Topps Willie Mays baseball card that I flipped with friends for fun in 1961, that
came out of a pack of cards with a dusty sliver of bubble gum, is now available in
protective jackets for $195.00.

The economics of baseball cards, as it has changed
over the past thirty years, is indicative of the change in the message that youngsters
receive from a society that has incorporated money into it's moment-to-moment
consciousness. We are focused on economic advantage in our daily relations with each other
and have elevated economic philosophy to status of religion. Contrast this philosophy to
that of the Catholic Worker Movement. Started on May 1, 1933, May Day, when Dorothy Day, a
journalist, and Peter Maurin, a philosopher, began a newspaper called, The Catholic
Worker. This newspaper is still available today for a subscription price of $0.01 (one
penny) per issue. (It's two bits for a year's subscription).

Grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity
of every human person, their movement was committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and
the Works of Mercy as a way of life. It wasn't long before Dorothy and Peter were putting
their beliefs into action, opening a 'house of hospitality' where the homeless, the
hungry, and the forsaken would always be welcome...attempt to alleviate the sufferings of
the poor by adopting lives of voluntary poverty in order to be free for direct, personal
involvement, not so much dispensing charity as sharing in the lives of others.

The Catholic Worker Movement and the newspaper by
the same name, continues today. When I read The Catholic Worker, while I do not
have the commitment to voluntary poverty, I often center my thoughts somewhere between the
prevalent unbridled economics of profit and greed all around us, and the possibility that
the world can be a better place when we take on the role of helpers and caretakers of each
other.

At the age of forty-seven, I may be too old to
witness the event in my lifetime. I am hopeful however. I firmly believe that economics
will so alienate the masses in time, that as modern predatory Capitalism reaches middle
age and midlife crisis, the people will adjust their thinking accordingly and stop living
their lives with their hands in their pocketbook and start living their lives with their
hearts and hands extended in helping each other. Perhaps, reaching this cross road,
nations and corporations alike will join them. To do otherwise is to flirt with
catastrophe.

Quotes

Concern for man himself and his fate must always
form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved
problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods - in order that the
creations of the mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in
the midst of your diagrams and equations.

Address, California Institute of Technology 1931Albert Einstein

In his role as Elizabeth's favorite Raleigh was
quick to seek benefits and rewards. The queen once rebuked him mildly for his rapacity,
saying 'When will you cease to be a beggar?' When you cease to be a benefactress, ma'am,'
replied Raleigh.

Raleigh

"In the United States, every person elected
president in this century has been the person who spent the largest amount of money. Was
this money well spent in the service of virtue or was it money ill-spent, the candidate
saying what had to be said to get elected?

The Catholic Worker, October-November, 1996

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate
the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot
serve both God and Money.

The New Testament

Since the Depression, few Americans have thought of
work reduction as a natural, continuous, and positive result of economic growth and
increased productivity. Instead, additional leisure has been seen as a drain on the
economy, a liability on wages, and the abandonment of economic progress."Joe
Dominguez and Vicki Robin